It is weird how some statements are so sublime they stick with you for years. In my 20’s a peer told me a story about his first year of teaching at a small New England school. He had been hired to teach math, but when the school’s ski coach left, he had to take over. Problem was, he was not a great skier and the captain of the team was one of the best skiers in the country. It was an intimidating situation until my friend simply asked the kid, “I don’t know how I can help you? You know more about skiing than I’ll ever know.” The question was reasonable. The boy’s answer was brilliant.
“You can watch me go through the gates. I can’t see me go through the gates.”
Of all the banal conversations I had in my twenties, this kid’s exquisite answer hit me in face and resonates to this day. It is such a simple invitation— “just watch me.”
I think nearly everyone experiences parenting, like my coaching friend, full of uncertainty and confusion. There is literally no way to know how to get your kid from infancy to an independent adulthood. There is no failsafe plan. What works for one kid or one family might not work for you or your family. So how do you know what to do? Merely recognizing your limitation might be the first step, then take the ski kid’s advice, “just watch.”
Attention is affection.
The rigors of parenting can be overwhelming. It is easy to think that all of our efforts and sacrifices are expressions of love and they are—for us. But, care-taking and affection are not the same thing. Meeting a child’s basic needs does not require love and a child doesn’t experience your sacrifices as love. They don’t care about your hard work, your struggling bank account, or even how much you love them. We think the depth of our love is automatically transmitted to a child, but it’s not.
In the midst of a break up, many years ago, a girlfriend said, “But, I love you.” I replied, “What good does that do me if I never experience it?” To love is not enough. Just because we feel love for our children does not mean they experience it. I’ve heard many people (including myself) say, “Well yeah I was loved, my parents took good care of me.” We accept that what our parents did for us is love—and it is. But knowing you are loved is very different from the experience of feeling loved.
A few years ago, I popped into the office of friend who is a graphic designer. She had a haggard look on her face and told me she was knee deep in some billing and accounting. We talked about how much we dreaded dealing with numbers and details. Then she shared a wonderful perspective, “Well, this crap is just my job and my job lets me do my work.” She loved building websites, illustrating books, and designing logos. That was her work. She had to endure the rigors of her “job” so she could continue enjoying the love of her “work.”
Doing things for our children is kind of like the job my friend referred to. It’s the details of parenting. The relentless list of feeding, carpooling, diaper changing, and the like. But, as my friend so eloquently stated, her job is just a means to an end. Her job enables her to enjoy her work. Sometimes, when we see parenting as merely taking care of a child, providing for them, and managing their needs, kids just become a burdensome task. Much of the time I feel tremendous love when I am cooking, cleaning, and caring for my kid. I can love that part of my “job.” But, my love of caretaking is not the kind of love that is transmitted to a child. It is literally a thankless job, because young kids are not going to appreciate your sacrifices. We think children experience care-taking as expressions of love, but they don’t. It may be hard to imagine this, but a child does not need you to love them. A child needs to experience your love for them. It is easy to hold love for our kids, but with all the overwhelming distractions and demands of our lives, creating space to provide “the felt sense of love” sometimes takes intention.
We all know the story of the “ungrateful child” with the parent screaming, “After all I’ve done for you…!” Turns out kids care less about what we do for them and a lot more about what we do withthem. For much of my life I was a workaholic. Being busy felt good and productive. I maintained that strategy into parenting, telling myself I was a good parent because of all of the things I was doing formy child. I could pat myself on the back and call myself a loving parent, but I wasn’t actually loving. Doing things was just another distraction. It was an escape from intimacy.
I’ve been a child and family therapist for nearly 30 years. I know how to “hold space” and listen. But there is a professional boundary in therapy that is safe. In my office I can love without vulnerability. But with a wife and child, love without vulnerability is not the kind of love a family needs and deserves. Growing up in a family where love was not self-evident, leaning into a deeper level of intimacy was excruciating. Loving with that level of intimacy did not come naturally to me at all. I had to learn how to stop, listen, and look my child in the eyes when he was talking to me. Letting go of a “to do list” felt scary, when in reality it’s what my family and I needed. Slowly I learned to pause and instead of saying, “that looks like an elephant.” I can say, “you look like you are having a lot of fun with that drawing, wanna tell me about it?” Instead of saying “you don’t need to be upset about that,” I just look him in the eyes and say, “you seem upset.” Instead of, nodding my head and thinking about work, while he’s telling me some gossip about school—I actually listen.’ It seems so simple now, but growing up in a more “transactional” family, truly paying attention was a skill I am still learning.
Affection is attention.
Paying attention to a child, being with them in their world, witnessing them, and appreciating them for who they are—is affection. It is amazing how noticing a new haircut, admiring artwork, an even “have you brushed your teeth yet?” enlivens them. Adults love attention, but they don’t need it like a child does. Why do they demand it in equal measure to food, water, and a clean diaper? Somehow they know that just remaining alive is not living. Living is being present in the world and you can’t really be present until you feel witnessed as a person. It is attention, the back and forth of communication, the mirroring of emotion, and the experience of affection that enables a child to know they exist. By experiencing you, they experience themselves. They become. Attention is a need that cannot be provided at a distance. You have to be there to show a child, not just that they are, but who they are[LK1] . M.R. Montgomery in his book Saying Goodbye: A Memoir for Two Fathers captures this perfectly:
There is a thing that happens with children: If no one is watching them, nothing is really happening to them. It is not some philosophical conundrum like the one about the tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it: that is a puzzler for college freshman. No. If you are very small, you actually understand that there is no point in jumping into the swimming pool unless they see you do it. The child crying, ‘‘Watch me, watch me,’’ is not begging for attention; he is pleading for existence itself.
The dialogue between coach and athlete, parent and child, is essential. It requires the humble recognition that your child has something valuable to teach you. Neither parents, nor coaches, nor kids have all the right answers. Those answers are merely the result of making dynamic adjustments in accordance with observations and feedback. And those answers are still not the right answers. They are just one step better than the previous attempt. Children demand attention because they know parents can’t learn how to parent without watching them. They also know that they can’t learn how to be a person without parents watching them. The high school skier did not reply, “Well in that case, just drive to the mountain coach.” He said, “Watch me and I will show you what I need.”
This is so good. Attention is so valuable--that's why tech companies keep trying to grab it from us. Lots of fantastic thoughts in this post. I'm going to keep coming back to it.
Wonderful pose, Tom.